Common pattern - the acqui-hire.
“These people are working in a problem area that we want to do better in. We’ll buy their company for their expertise.”
Whether they keep existing products or not is not a major factor in the decision and gets evaluated later. Often, because they want the people working on something new the existing products are put into maintenance mode or shut down.
Source: Have been acquired for both talent and for product. Seen both.
Their excuse was “this is basically public info, anyways, like the phone book”. Yeah. People could request removal from the phone book in case they had an abusive former spouse, or stalker, or they were in hiding from something. You can’t legally not be on the voter rolls.
This is so unbelievably typical from the far-right: “Doing this wouldn’t be a problem for me, so it couldn’t be a problem for anyone else.”
I’m nearly the fucking pinnacle of privilege (white, male, cis, het, relatively upper-class, middle-aged) and I see how dangerous this move could be. It’s nearly impossible to believe that any group of people could be this stupid, but I keep having to learn that lesson again and again.
The worst part about the article (see comment for source) is that in a sense, the author isn’t wrong. Developing skills helps with challenges, whether they are caused by a neurodivergency or not. Also, labels can limit people and people can hold themselves back because of seeing their condition as innate and not changeable (which it is, but everything around it can change). I don’t doubt that her autism diagnosis was not useful for her and she feels better letting it go. And there are very toxic elements in the neurodiversity community, just like in other communities.
The problem is that none of the above actually invalidates the diagnosis. It’s all context in which the life of the person with the diagnosis plays out. So she may very well still be autistic by any reasonable definition. I don’t know her. And the attitude which this kind of article permits others to take can be scary.
(This doesn’t get into my big issue with a large swath of the DSM, which calls a bucket of symptoms a diagnosis without any understanding of underlying causes. With other medical fields we’ve often found that there are multiple diseases underlying the population of patients with a cluster of symptoms (e.g. recent discovery of multiple variants of Parkinsons with different origins). I personally suspect that there are multiple distinct conditions that underpin what we currently bucket as “autism”, and same with many of the other conditions in that section of the DSM. The only one we understand even reasonably well is ADHD, AFAICT. We at least have brain differences and some genetic components mapped out, but we’re still learning more all the time, e.g. recent study which suggests primary mode of operation of the condition is reward, not attention, which is why stimulants work.)
Chief Miles O’Brien would like a word…
I know. This change is going to disconnect so many Canadians. I’m quite angry about it. I don’t know what I think of Avi Lewis yet, but his “a public option for everything” might hopefully shift the Overton window in Canada a bit?
(ma composition Francais manque du pratique depuis vingt ans, pardonnez-moi)
For those who don’t know, Bluesky isn’t really federated. The only way to host a non-Bluesky instance required 1TB of storage in July 2024, and 5 TB of storage in Nov 2024. Could be way more than that now.
You basically have to be a company to federate into the ATProto (Bluesky) ecosystem. You can’t just “stand up an instance”.
Lots of detail: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
(I know you’ve already realized that you were conflating Mastodon with Bluesky, I’m putting this here for others who come along so they can get the facts).
Two things can both be bad.
Bad people can be right.
Saying “this video by the Iranian regime roasts the US regime” doesn’t automatically mean that the Iranians are right. I see the rebuttal that there’s an implicit boosting and platforming of this which normalizes it. I don’t know which is worse. I think we’ll need hindsight for that.